Show HN: Spark, An advanced 3D Gaussian Splatting renderer for Three.js

The tradeoff is initial complexity (your "hello world" for WebGL showing one object will include a shader and priming data arrays for that shader), but as consequence of design the API sort of forces more computation into the GPU layer, so the fact JavaScript is driving it matters very little.

THREE.js adds a nice layer of abstraction atop that metal.

How do Babylon, Aframe, Three.js, and PlayCanvas [2] compare from those that have used them?

IIUC, PlayCanvas is the most mature, featureful, and performant, but it's commercial. Babylon is the featureful 3D engine, whereas Three.js is fairly raw. Though it has some nice stuff for animation, textures, etc., you're really building your own kit.

Any good experiences (or bad) with any of these?

OP, your demo is rock solid! What's the pitch for Aframe?

How do you see the "gaussian splat" future panning out? Will these be useful for more than visualizations and "digital twins" (in the industrial setting)? Will we be editing them and animating them at any point in the near future? Or to rephrase, when (or will) they be useful for the creative and gaming fields?

[1] https://github.com/aframevr/aframe

[2] https://playcanvas.com/

The good:

1. Blender plugin for baked mesh animation export to stream asset is cool

2. the procedural texture tricks combined with displacement maps mean making reasonable looking in game ocean/water possible with some tweaking

3. adding 2D sprite swap out for distant objects is trivial (think Paper Mario style)

The bad:

1. burns gpu vram far faster than normal engines (dynamic paint bloats up fast when duplicating aliases etc. )

2. JS burns CPU cycles, but the wasm support is reasonable for physics/collision

3. all resources are exposed to end users (expect unsophisticated cheaters/cloners)

The ugly:

1. mobile gpu support on 90% of devices is patchwork

2. baked lighting ymmv (we tinted the gpu smoke VFX to cheat volumetric scattering)

3. in browser games essentially combine the worst aspects of browser memory waste, and security sandbox issues (audio sync is always bad in browser games)

Anecdotally, I would only recommend the engine for server hosted transactional games (i.e. cards or board games could be a good fit.)

Otherwise, if people want something that is performant, and doesn't look awful.... Than just use the Unreal engine, and hire someone that mastered efficient shader tricks. =3